In my current job, the team are working on deploying an application onto Azure using Kubernetes, so it was time to do some reading around the technologies that are being used.

Docker is used by the company as the universal packaging mechanism. The engine part of the application is written in C++, with a combination of Go and Python being used to wrap this to produce the final product. Multi-stage docker builds are used to build the application itself, as well as docker containers for running the various tests. The cloud version of the system is also deployed using Kubernetes using more containers.

This book was a great introduction to docker, with the first chapters providing a good introduction as to why containers are a good idea. It covers the common use cases, and goes through the many command line calls you will need to use to understand what is going on. The next chapter is also very good, with a good explanation of what is happening at the Linux level. There is also a chapter on docker-compose, which is interesting though not particularly relevant if you are deploying to Kubernetes.

This book was also a good read. Terraform is used by the system at work to do the initial provisioning of the AKS cluster and associated networking and external resources. This short book gives as good overview of Terraform, and has a good running example that shows you how it is used for real.

This was an easy read, which starts with a good overview to how machine learning has come of age. The book then describes the 5 tribes of machine learning – the symbolists, the connectionists, the evolutionaries, the Bayesians, and the analogisers, and gives a brief overview of how their techniques work. The rest of the book discusses how these techniques will need to be merged to get to a master algorithm, and the author covers some of the work he has done to do this on the Alchemy system.